In wireless applications, wireless and/or handheld devices may require sufficient design flexibility to have their data processing hardware interface to a plurality of RF front-end receivers. The baseband signal from an RF front-end receiver may be in the form of an in-phase (I) component and a quadrature (Q) component, generally referred to as an I/Q data signal, and there may be a need to process the amplitude, phase, frequency, and/or sampling rate of these signal components before they reach a baseband processor. For this purpose, a baseband receiver interface may be used to interface RF front-end receivers with baseband processors and/or other data processing blocks in a wireless device.
As the operating requirements for wireless devices become more demanding, the complexity of the interactions between data processing hardware and RF front-end receivers also increases. For example, RF front-end receivers from various vendors may be required to work effectively with a baseband processor from a different vendor. The use of individual baseband receiver interfaces for each of the possible RF front-end receivers with which a baseband processor may interface, may prove to be costly in terms of layout space in an integrated circuit. Because component size and cost are critical concerns in wireless devices, the use of multiple baseband receiver interfaces should be limited as much as possible. Moreover, this approach may also limit the number of possible interfaces that may be implemented with a particular baseband processor.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.